I'm having a hard time getting started studying for my chemistry midterm. i'm kind of overwhelmed. my teacher gave me a brief study guide, but where would be the best place to start? are notecards effective for studying chemistry?

I have found them to be effective. And give yourself some time. Study over several days instead of trying to do it all in one night. And I never had any luck with pulling an all nighter. I also found that it would help to write the notes as I read them out loud. In fact, I often wrote the notes several times. It helped burn those things into my memory. Finally, the more you can understand the more you don't need to memorize. I always felt like my memory had a limit to it so I tried to understand as much as I could. That freed me from memorizing that part of my notes. Good luck.